Under the heavy influence of the Church, sexual acts during the Middle Ages were policed to an extreme. Despite this state of oppression, people still liked sex. And as you are about to find out, sex during those times was far more interesting than you would expect.

10 Prostitution Was Considered a Necessary Evil

Prostitution was rife throughout the Middle Ages, and while the clergy weren’t happy about it, they made little effort to stop it. Clerics realized that many men needed this outlet and that a lack of prostitution could do more harm than good. They feared that otherwise, men would corrupt respectable women or, even worse, turn to homosexuality.

Despite being tolerated, some ordinances reflected the prostitutes’ lowly standing in society. They were obligated to wear certain types of clothing so that they could be distinguished from respectable ladies. In addition, they had to live in certain areas of the city and had no legal standing in a court of law.^[1] Brothels were usually thinly disguised as bathhouses or craft shops like embroideries, where women could serve as “apprentices.”

9 Impotence Was Grounds for Marriage Annulment

Many European countries during the Middle Ages had laws that regarded consummation as an integral part of the marriage ceremony. Therefore, if someone was unable or unwilling to procreate, their partner could request an annulment. In addition, an inability to perform the marital duty could result in a trial where the man had to prove that he was physically capable of having sex.

There are dozens of reported cases of impotence trials in medieval times.^[2] One of the most famous occurred in 1198, between King Philip II of France and his second wife, Ingeborg, the daughter of the Danish king, Valdemar I. For some reason, Philip hated Ingeborg and didn’t want to have her as queen of France. In a strange twist, the man was actually the one arguing that the marriage had not been consummated, pleading “temporary impotence.”

8 Women Used Contraceptives

Since ancient times, humans have developed numerous techniques to avoid conception. However, until recently, historians believed that usage of contraceptives dropped sharply during the Middle Ages. For starters, the Catholic Church frowned greatly upon them since they saw procreation as a gift from God and the entire reason to get married. Furthermore, scholars believed that women would not be interested in limiting pregnancies due to high infant mortality rates.

However, demographics studies show that pregnancy rates decreased significantly in women over 30, suggesting that they employed various contraceptive methods. Even so, written records of these practices are very scarce due to the Church’s influence and staunch opposition to contraception. Historians believed this created an “oral culture of contraception,” where the “tricks of the trade” were passed down from midwife to midwife. Coitus interruptus was a common birth control method, as were plant-based contraceptives, such as a pessary made out of lily root and rue.^[3]

7 The Church Thought Midwives Forced Women Into Sex With the Devil

The late Middle Ages were characterized, among other things, by prolific witch hunts, which saw tens of thousands of people (mostly women) persecuted for witchcraft. Numerous “suspicious” practices could get you declared a witch, and sometimes, this included midwifery.

Things got worse after Pope Innocent VIII issued the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus in 1484, acknowledging the existence of witches and approving their prosecution. In response, inquisitor Heinrich Kramer wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, still considered the most important treatise on witchcraft. Kramer claimed that nobody harmed the Catholic Faith more than midwives.^[4] He accused midwives of tricking young women into having sex with the Devil and then using unbaptized infants for witchcraft.

Despite the influence of the Malleus Maleficarum, many historians now argue that midwives were rarely accused of witchcraft. Although they are mentioned in other demonology texts, “midwives-as-witches” is regarded as a modern myth brought on by works of earlier historians like Margaret Murray.

6 Clergymen Could Sometimes Get Married

During the Middle Ages, the history of clerical marriages is long and convoluted, with numerous changes occurring over the centuries. At the start of the era, Byzantine emperor Justinian annulled all marriages of members of the Holy Order and declared all of their children illegitimate.^[5]

The law of celibacy remained in place for hundreds of years, but it wasn’t always enforced with particular fervor. There was also a distinction made between clergymen who were allowed to marry and married men who were allowed to become clergy. The latter was more common, although typically only if it was their first marriage, and the men were usually expected to show sexual continence once they joined the clerical ranks.

After the Great Schism of 1054, both churches became stricter, and celibacy was enforced again. Clerical marriages were prohibited at the First Council of the Lateran in 1123. These marriages became common again during the Protestant Reformation, as Martin Luther himself was married to Katharina von Bora.

5 Lesbianism Was Considered a Medical Problem

While homosexuality was a “hot topic” during the Middle Ages, attention was usually focused on men. Consequently, there is very little mention of female homosexuality. One of the few medieval laws that specifically target lesbianism comes from the mid-13th-century French treatise Li Livres de jostice et de plet (The Book of Justice and of Pleas). Female sodomy received a similar punishment to its male counterpart: mutilation for the first two offenses and burning for the third.

Lesbianism was regarded as a medical problem brought on by one of two disorders: The first came from the ancient Greek physician Galen, who advised that lack of sex would cause a seed buildup in women’s wombs. The treatment involved an orgasm, generally brought on by a midwife with a hot poultice.^[6] The other condition was called “ragadia of the womb.” It was believed that women could develop penis-like protuberances outside their vaginas, which would make them want to have sex with other women.

4 They Used Sex Toys

While sex toys were not invented during the Middle Ages, they were used. Actually, the first sex toys appear in the archaeological record about 30,000 years ago. They existed in various shapes and sizes, made from a wide range of materials, including stone, wood, ivory, tar, teeth, limestone, and even bones. Art from ancient Egypt depicts dildos—for both men and women. And the ancient Greeks—that’s a whole other list right there. Rather than earlier versions of stone or wood, the Greeks made theirs of leather or animal hair, using olive oil as a lubricant.

During the Middle Ages, dildos were commonly made of bread (something the ancient Greeks also did).^[7] Their use was generally done in secret as not to incur the wrath and punishment of the Church. Women would bake loaves of bread until they were hard enough to be used as dildos. I can’t imagine how that would’ve worked out. They must have hurt…

3 There Was Cross-Dressing

Cross-dressing hasn’t been regarded as an accepted practice until recently, and it’s still frowned upon in many parts of the world. Unsurprisingly, it was taboo in medieval England, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. One Oxford study presented the cases of 13 women who were cited for cross-dressing in England during the 15th century. Records show that male cross-dressing was just as, if not more, prevalent.^[8]

Most cross-dressers tended to be prostitutes who engaged in this practice for their (or their partner’s) sexual desire. Authorities of the time went to great lengths to downplay the pervasiveness of such acts, claiming they were vices from other cultures perpetrated by foreigners.

2 Missionary Was the Preferred Position

The Church considered sex a means to an end for procreation. That’s how missionary became the default position; man-on-top and face-to-face was thought to give the best chances for pregnancy. They feared that any other position might confuse the natural order. Some positions like sex a tergo (from behind) were considered “beastly” and were thought to blur the lines between man and animal.

Church authorities strictly forbade oral and anal sex throughout the Middle Ages. Since there was no chance of procreation, these would have been purely for sexual pleasure, which was viewed as a lustful sin.

As time passed, certain officials became somewhat more progressive. During the 13th century, German friar Albertus Magnus ranked five positions from most to least natural: missionary, side-by-side, seated, standing, and a tergo. While missionary was still the number-one pick, he regarded the others as “morally questionable but not mortally sinful.”^[9]

1 There Were Punishments for Every Sexual Sin

When it came to punishments, the Church wanted to make sure they got things right. That’s why the Middle Ages saw the appearance of penitentials—books detailing the rules for penance for every sin under the sun. They came about from priests who started documenting the sins they heard during confession and the penances set for each one.

Unsurprisingly, there were quite a few sins involving sex. There were also quite a few penitentials, but one of the most influential was the Paenitentiale Theodori by Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury.

According to Theodore, men fornicating with men or with animals had to do penance for 10 years. Women fornicating with women had to do penance for 3 years. Masturbation meant that men had to abstain from meat for four days, while women had to repent for a whole year. This only applied to virgins or widows, as married women earned more penance, of course. Ejaculating seed into the mouth was the worst evil and required penance for life.^[10]

Although it was a flourishing metropolis in the 1700s and 1800s, Naples, Italy, then a kingdom in its own right, was home to multitudes of the poor, many of whom lived in one-room dwellings and were often on the move. In need of cheap, quickly consumed food, they relied on flatbread garnished with toppings of cheese, tomatoes, oil, anchovies, and garlic. Immigrants to the United States brought their staple food with them, and pizza became a sensation in their new country, with the first pizzeria in the US opening for business in Manhattan in 1905.^[1]

Pizza is now a favorite across the planet, though how it’s made varies greatly place to place. As these ten tantalizing facts show, the dish is subject to innovation, research, study, and artistic interpretation. Even animals scrounge for, or steal, the Neapolitan taste sensation.

10 Robot Pizza Employees

Zume Pizza employs both humans and robots. Human employees help prepare the food, develop recipes, conduct taste tests, and enhance the product’s quality based on customer input. The robot workers “perform highly competitive tasks like squirting and spreading tomato sauce and placing pizzas in ovens.”

Located in Mountain View, California, the company, headed by CEO Julia Collins, has set its goal at serving the entire San Francisco Bay Area by the end of 2018.^[2]

9 Pizza Pizza Box

After devouring the pies made by Vinnie’s Pizzeria in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, customers can eat the boxes in which the pizzas were delivered. Inspired by the sight of empty pizza boxes in Brooklyn trash cans, co-owner Sean Berthiaume decided to make edible containers made out of pizza. During a lull in the pizzeria’s business, Berthiaume experimented with the idea.^[3]

For $40, customers can have the pizza-within-a-pizza box delivered to their homes or businesses. The pizza and its container are wrapped in foil and delivered in a pizza bag. (No, the bag isn’t made of pizza.)

“I like to experiment,” Berthiaume admitted. Last year, one of his experiments produced a pizza topped with smaller slices of pizza.

8 Mathematical Pies And Slices

Mathematician Eugenia Cheng knows a thing or two about pizza. In 2013, she devised a formula by which to determine the ideal size for a pie. According to Cheng, the determining factor is the crust. In inventing her formula, Cheng proceeded on the basis that smaller slices have more toppings, so they taste better than larger slices with fewer toppings, and the center of the pie is thicker with toppings than the edges. As far as taste goes, thinner crusts are better than thicker crusts, because the latter decreases the bread-toppings ratio and could become soggy.

PizzaExpress, a UK chain, commissioned Cheng’s project in order to ascertain why its customers preferred 36-centimeter (14 in) pies to 28-centimeter (11 in) pies. Based on Cheng’s findings, which matched customers’ tendencies to favor crispier crusts and balanced toppings, PizzaExpress added 15 grams of dough to its recipe.

In other research involving the investigation of a pattern of equal-size tiles, Joel Haddley and Stephen Worsley of the University of Liverpool found “a way to slice curvy pieces with nearly an infinite number of sides (as long as it’s an odd number of sides) and then further divide those slices in half.” They came up with a more ostentatious way of achieving the same result, cutting “each slice [into] more complex shapes by creating wedges in the sides.”^[4]

7 Self-Driving Pizza Delivery Vehicle

Pizzerias are going high-tech in other ways, too. Domino’s Pizza and its partner, Ford Motor Company, have set themselves the goal of delivering pizzas involving “a simulated autonomous vehicle experience” featuring a Ford Fusion hybrid. Ann Arbor City Council member Sumi Kailasapathy happened to see the driverless delivery vehicle during a test drive, and she asked the research team whether the vehicle could detect and stop for a pedestrian waiting on a curb to cross the street at a crosswalk at which there’s neither a signal nor any other people already in the crosswalk.

According to the engineers, the vehicle could detect Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons, the signals activated by pedestrians at crosswalks equipped with them, and stop for them to cross, but they hadn’t heard of the type of crosswalks mentioned by Kailasapathy. In a follow-up e-mail, Alan Hale, a Ford spokesman, assured the city council that the vehicles could, in fact, detect pedestrians waiting to cross a street, whether the crosswalk was equipped with a signal or not, and would stop to allow them to cross the street. “When a vehicle is approaching a crosswalk, it knows it’s approaching a crosswalk, so it has specific rules to look for people in the area of the crosswalk,” he assured Kailasapathy and the other council members.

The driverless delivery vehicles would also be equipped with such other detection capabilities as algorithms that can predict pedestrian behavior, radar and laser sensors, cameras covering 360 degrees, and 200-meter (660 ft) depth perception. The vehicles would also operate according to 3-D models of their environments that would include locations of roads, sidewalks, and buildings as well as such supplemental data as laws, road rules, crosswalks, traffic signals and signs, and other road markings.

Ford hopes to have driverless vehicles on the road by 2021, driving people to their destinations and delivering groceries, packages, and, of course, pizza.^[5]

6 Subconscious Menu

For customers who have trouble deciding what they want on their pizzas, Pizza Hut may have come up with the answer. A “subconscious menu” powered by Tobii Technology, a Swedish company, tracks customers’ eye movements as they check out various pizza toppings shown on the screen and then suggests a pie from among the 4,896 pizza combinations available. The software took six months to develop and was successful 98 percent of the time, according to results of tests that took place in the United Kingdom.

If the subconscious menu proves popular among UK customers, Pizza Hut may introduce it to its American patrons.^[6]

5 Floating Pizzeria

Pizza Pi is more than home to Sasha and Tara Bouis. Their 11-meter (37 ft) boat, built of quarter-inch-thick aluminum plate, is also a floating pizzeria supplying pizzas throughout the Virgin Islands. Sasha, who formerly pursued a Wall Street career, and his wife Tara, who taught elementary special education in Indiana and SCUBA lessons during summers in the Caribbean, gave up their respective careers to ply the tropical waves while supplying their gluten-free, “made-from-scratch” pizza, with “slow-fermentation New York style crust” to local residents and vacationing tourists.

Tara designed, renovated, and built the boat herself. Besides the wind in her sails, the boat is powered by a Perkins 4.236 engine. A menu hangs down its side, listing Plain Jane, Mad Shroom, and Sweet Home pizzas, among other fare, and their respective prices, as well as pies made to order. Although the boat never docks, there’s a window through which transactions can occur between Pizza Pi and customers’ boats, and the couple delivers within the confines of Christmas Cove.^[7]

Hunger inspired the idea for their business. “We were sitting on a boat right here in Christmas Cove,” Sasha recalled, “watching the sunset, and I got hungry.” The presence of tourists suggested that a “pizza boat” could do well, Tara said, so she got to work renovating an old boat to her specifications, while Sasha worked on the engine. Termites helped by consuming the “entire interior” of the boat, leaving Tara with a “perfect blank slate.” To learn about building the boat and running a restaurant, they watched “tons of YouTubes,” Tara said.

On a busy day, the couple sell as many as 70 pies as well as alcoholic beverages and desserts. To toss the pizza dough in the cramped galley, Tara has to kneel. Their 22-month-old daughter, Fiona, acts as their public relations agent, chatting with the crowd, who calls her “Pizza Baby” while chowing down on the family’s product.

4 Animal Pizza Lovers

Included among devotees of pizza are some rather furry aficionados. One, dubbed “Pizza Rat” by New Yorkers, scavenges the city’s subway stations, collecting discarded pizza slices. Possession doesn’t necessarily secure ownership, though, and Pizza Rat sometimes has to fend off other rodents intent on stealing his slice of the pie. A brawl between Pizza Rat and rivals, captured by a subway rider, shows Pizza Rat dragging a slice of pizza downstairs and into a fenced-off area, where he’s ambushed by two other rats. A tug of war ensues between the hungry rodents. This time, it appears Pizza Rat loses the contest.^[8]

“Pizza Squirrel” is another rodent that enjoys pizza. A Chicagoan, Pizza Squirrel forages among the garbage of the city’s Ukranian Village for his slices, which he enjoys perched on the branch of a neighborhood tree. Andrew Goodman, the Chicago resident who snapped the rodent’s picture, said, “It was exactly like the pizza rat, except he was hopping.” The photo made its rounds on the Internet after Andrew’s friend, Melissa McEwan, posted it on Twitter.

Another animal who enjoys pizza stole, rather than scavenged, his meal. The sly fox, noting an unattended parked van with its passenger-side door open, leaped into the front of the vehicle, snatched a slice of pizza, and hastened off with his loot, thereby earning the nickname “Pizza Fox.”

3 Pizza Farm

When Naomi Paley and Rachel Kraynick, regional farm business management specialist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture in Yorkton, agreed to establish their pizza farm, they worked with with several industry groups, Kraynick said. The farm is circular in shape, its field divided into ten wedges, each of which is dedicated to the cultivation of a different ingredient for pizza toppings. Plots are dedicated to onions, basil and oregano, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and other pizza ingredients, Paley said, including the cheese produced from cows’ milk (represented in the farm’s “pie” by a “slice” of pasture) and the ham produced from hogs occupying another “slice” of pasture.

Third- and fourth-grade students, who’ve already learned about soils and plants, visit the farm for hands-on instruction about “the importance of technology to production,” the nutrients plants need, the use of chemicals in agriculture, and environmental awareness. There are worries about the use of herbicides, chemicals, and fertilizers, Paley said, but the farm’s “side-by-side slices will show how such things improve crop health and production.” The pizza farm also provides work for Whitespruce residents who’ve been convicted of crimes, the sentences for which include community service. During the summer, they water and weed the slices of the pizza farm’s pie.^[9]

2 Pizza Art Exhibit

Oto Gillen made his pizza (pictured above) from UV glass, mahogany, and screws, serving up his pie on a mat board, while John Freeman and Justin Lowe used a single ingredient: papier-mache, which, in French, appropriately enough, means “chewed paper.”

Gillen, Freeman, and Lowe are among the other artists who contributed works to PIZZA TIME!, the first show of Manhattan’s Marlborough Broome Street Gallery, which featured over 25 works of pizza-inspired art. Curator Vera Neykov described pizza as a “metaphor for community.” A food that’s “not too fussy,” it unites communities, she said.

John Riepenhoff’s conceptual piece, Physical Pizza Networking Theory, was a 97-centimeter (38 in) pie that was itself topped by smaller pizzas. An interactive exhibit, Riepenhoff’s work, cooked by a local pizzeria, was consumed on opening night by the gallery’s visitors. The artist described the pizza as a “collage [that] address[es] the ontology of the social as material in art.” Other works on exhibit include Michelle Devereux’s Caveman on Pizza and Dude on Pizza #6 ; Andrew Kuo’s Slice 8/23/13 and Piece/Peace, which depicted slices “in geometric shards and colorful smears”; and Will Boone’s Brothers Pizza, which shows the eerie effect achieved by photocopying a pizza.^[10]

1 Gigantic Pizza

The Dirt Road Cookers, a group of eight caterers located in San Antonio, Texas, joined forces to create the world’s largest pizza. The result was a 4.3-square-meter (46.6 ft²), 45-kilogram (100 lb) pie with a 235-centimeter (92.5 in) diameter. Head chef Kurt Oefinger said that baking the pie was truly a team effort. He supervised. Another team member tended the fire. Two others prepared the toppings. Another pair worked on the pizza’s base. Two more supplied water to the other thirsty workers. “It gets hot,” Oefinger said.

It took the group an hour and 45 minutes to complete the task. It also took a year to build the necessary equipment to cook the pizza. Despite their efforts and some claims that the pizza was the largest ever made, Guinness World Records recognizes a much larger, 1,261.7-square-meter (13,580.3 ft²) pizza made in Rome in 2012 as the record holder.^[11] The Dirt Road Cookers’ pizza would still be a daunting sight for even the most hardened eating contest veteran, however.

Gary Pullman, an instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, lives south of Area 51, which, according to his family and friends, explains “a lot.” His 2016 urban fantasy novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt, available on Amazon.com, was published by The Wild Rose Press.